11 Great Tips for Google+ Success

Twitter. Facebook. LinkedIn. Instagram. As of right now, these four social sights are essentially the four biggest hubs for business marketing in the digital realm. Twitter and Facebook offer the biggest audiences, Instagram is great for up and coming products and businesses and LinkedIn is perfect as a B2B starting point. Taking all of this into consideration, why would your business ever need to rely on another social site?

There are other potential choices, like Tumblr and YouTube, but these aren’t as popular with the business crowd. There are some outliers, but these are millennial hangout spots for the most part. Pinterest might be good if you’re a product oriented business, but it certainly isn’t for everybody.

One underappreciated social networking site, however, is Google+. Despite having a user base of over 1 billion, with almost 400 million active users, Google+ is a social underdog in terms of popularity. You might remain skeptical, however, and that’s okay – how often do you see people talking like “hit me up on Google+” or “I saw what you put on Google+ this afternoon!”

One of the biggest reasons to consider Google+ as a social networking site for you is simply its big name affiliation. See, Google essentially decides the life and death of small businesses based on their search rankings, meaning it’s always great to get in good with Google. Businesses on Google+ rank better in Google’s search engine. This kind of digital nepotism is something you have to stay in tune with.

Other reasons to start using the social site include:

It’s always good to jump on the bandwagon early.

All Google+ posts are automatically indexed.

The business information on Goolge+ is concise and easy to locate.

Site communities make it easier to get in touch with business circles.

Site and content discovery.

It’s the second biggest social networking site with 60% more users than Twitter.

Google+ has over half a billion registered users every month.

It’s the 4th most popular app in the world.

It’s 100% free.

These are all great reasons to consider getting a Google+ account, which is something you’re probably mulling over at the very least.

Let’s say that you fully bought that you should get a Google+ account – that’s great! But just like other social media platforms, however, it’s not just as simple as posting some pictures and calling it a day.

To kick off your Google+ journey, follow these great tips for social media success:

Don’t just leave your profile bare. Your social media hubs are also tools for optimization, so leaving them blank is a death sentence both literally and figuratively for your business. Fill these out with as much detail as possible.

Google+ gives users the ability to upload cover photos, much like Facebook. Also like Facebook, you can upload one that is 100% customized. Put some effort into Photoshop or buy a graphic to use to amp your social success.

Don’t ignore your photo, either. On both your personal and business accounts, it’s always great to add a few personal touches. For your personal Google+, make sure your display photo is a professional picture of yourself. Your company Google+ display can be a logo, but it’s also great to include more personal shots in your work photo gallery.

Post every single day. No skipping, no excuses. Even if you have to scrape the bottom of the barrel for something to say, which shouldn’t be a problem in an active business, you should have at least one post put up every day to stay active.

Go out of your way to comment on the posts of others. Plus them, comment and keep the conversation going. When you’re engage, your consumers are more likely to bounce back and join in on your conversations, upping engagement statistics.

Use the sharing features to share other’s posts. It doesn’t even matter if they’re your biggest rival – if they post about something relevant to you, share it. This makes you look more personable and like you run a business that wants to inform consumers.

Google+ works like Twitter, so you have to @ consumers. You don’t just speak to consumers on Google+ and expect them to get the memo. No, Google+ also works on the inventive @ system popularized by Twitter.

Another common trait between Twitter and Google+ is the use of hashtags. They work in the same way on both sites, though Google+ is admittedly better at indexing their results, making hashtags easier to use with them than on Twitter.

Always be prepared to engage. You need to put the “social” in “social network” if you want to succeed in business. Don’t post, post, post if you aren’t willing to comment, comment, comment on your Google+ activity as well.

You can also follow others, much like Twitter. Follow people and business accounts that you click with – it’s not such a bad idea to have a follow-for-follow system going on in the beginning to help boost your traffic and follower count.

The more you post, the more successful you’ll b While this is true of any social media endeavor, Google+ is something of a trendsetting movement. The more active and engaging you are on Google+, the more site traffic you draw to it. Help make it more of a movement than it already is by posting daily and pushing out valuable content using the social media underdog.